UTC Website Projects

and CMS migration

Help! I Need Somebody, Not Just Anybody!

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I need somebody
(Help) not just anybody
(Help) you know I need someone
(Help)

Welcome to your first day of Spring term 2019. Before you even refill your coffee cup, you notice there are some changes needed on your departmental web site that just have to be fixed. Right. Now.

You could use some help from the UTC Web Team but aren’t sure how to contact them other than calling one of the team members and hoping their voicemail isn’t full or to find out they left the country and haven’t returned from break.

What if there was a better, quicker, more efficient way to contact the Web Team? What if there were 25 departments also identifying at the exact same time that they too need to make an update to their sites?

Introducing the UTC Web Request Form to the rescue! By using the link below, you’ll be routed to the form for completion: utc.edu/webrequest. (The link is also included in the footer of every page on UTC’s public website, www.utc.edu… look for Web Requests, near the bottom of the page.)

screenshot of web page, with link locations highlighted

Note: You will need to log in using your UTC ID and password to submit a request.

Click on the gold button  and you’ll be presented with a form that, upon submission, will automatically route to the entire Web Team where one of the team members will jump in to help.

screenshot of web request form, with example entries

A Look Back…and Forward

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As this will be the last post before Winter Break and the end of 2018, let’s take a look back over the last several months. Pour yourself a virtual toddy, throw a log on the fire and reflect on what has been accomplished.

Website Refresh: We have refreshed content, revitalized pages and transformed sites across the student-facing galaxy this fall. By the time you read this, these pages will be showing off their fresh new look and feel:

[Read more…]

Training Time

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In order to form a more perfect website, the UTC web team and colleagues from across campus, including the Library and Information Technology, will be participating in a series of training workshops.

Lee Walker, a local Drupal expert with Code Journeymen, kicks off the workshops this week, Dec. 10-14.  Lee’s workshops are intended for those with technical skill sets and who will be supporting the Drupal content migration and managing the system and coding environments.

The three sessions this week are:

  • Monday: Introduction to Git and Git Flow Branching Model
  • Wednesday:  Local Development with Lando
  • Friday: Composer Use and Best Practices

Training with Lee will continue in January and February on these topics:

  • Drupal 8 Configuration Management and Best Practices
  • Acquia Development Environment and use of BLT Tools
  • Continuous Integration, Automatic Test Running and Artifact Generation
  • Testing with Behat
  • Drupal Development Best Practices

If you are interested in participating in any of these upcoming technical workshops, call Chèrie Whipple at x4549 or Chris Gilligan at x4009.

We are also in the very early stages of planning a series of workshops offered by Acquia Professional Services. The workshops with Acquia include:

  • Migration Project Discovery
  • Architecture Planning
  • Drupal 8 Immersion for Developers (site building, layout and theming, module development)

End-user and editor training planning begins in the spring as migration dates firm up.

It Always Starts Small

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It’s called Scope Creep. It happens when someone says ‘we need a new dishwasher’ and seven months later, after walls have been removed, new cabinets have been set in place and new appliances hooked up, that you realize the $900 dishwasher cost way more and took a lot more time. Classic scope creep!

Most project managers recognize scope creep is happening when someone says, ‘Well, while we’re doing this anyway, let’s <fill in the blank>.’

[Read more…]

A Thanksgiving of Progress

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Time to assess progress and celebrate accomplishments! I started working with the UTC Communications and Marketing team in mid-September to provide project management for the Drupal migration. As projects often layout, a few other tasks have crept into the initial plan, but I’d like everyone to recognize what has been accomplished in summary form:

[Read more…]

What is migration?

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Birds definitely do it. Bees and educated fleas might do it.

I can surely state that data definitely…migrates. In that old song the metaphor referred more to falling in love than moving software and data around, but the concept of migration applies. Software and data don’t fly south for the winter, but they can fly to another location and those in information technology refer to this as a ‘migration.’

[Read more…]

Communicate: Why bother?

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Do you remember playing the Telephone Game as a child?

It’s the game where someone whispers a story to the next person and the whispering continues around the circle until the final ‘receiver’ relays the message to the entire group. Most of the time, this is followed by laughter as the story details have changed dramatically with each new receiver on the other end of the telephone line.  The grapevine or the water cooler can be metaphors for the Telephone Game played out in adult conversations.

[Read more…]

What is Project Management?

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Hope is not a plan.

I hope it doesn’t rain today, but I plan to take my umbrella just in case.

At the heart of project management is a hope or dream that, whatever the outcome, it will be positive and timely. The larger the project (dictated by number of people involved, amount of time needed to complete the project or general complexity of achieving the project goal), the more “project management” is needed.

Millions of projects are undertaken each year with little more than the final goal in mind.  Many of those will reach the goal with little more than an Excel spreadsheet of tasks and a person with the drive to see the mission accomplished.

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What’s the UTC Website Refresh Process?

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Similar to Cajun cooking, where the common understanding is that first you make a roux, before we can migrate to a new CMS, we need to make an inventory.

Simply moving out-of-date content or pages that aren’t working properly would lead to prolonged clean-up in the long run. The website refresh phase of improvement to utc.edu focuses on the clean-up and reorganization of existing content.

To begin the process, we are starting with sites that focus most heavily on students.

[Read more…]

What Is a Content Management System?

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Everything you see on any given website could be considered “content.”

From text to headers and footers, article titles, images, tags, tabs, comment boxes, links to other pages, boxes, calendars, charts and graphs—every piece of information has a unique placement to create the overall design of the page. A content management system, or CMS, is behind all of it, facilitating placement through the creation of templates.

[Read more…]